I am back at The Duchess for the second night in a week, praying that Bristolian George Ezra will make being battered by 40mph winds worth it. Having subtly slipped my way to the front I listen as the opening act, Hartlepool-born Dan Cook, fills the room with rhythm, soul and bluesy licks. With his warm Northern accent he charms the audience and the pain of the journey is forgotten.
At only 19 years old, George Ezra has a depth of tone comparable to Johnny Cash, with a rich and deep velvety vibration to his vocal. He names his influences as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan (The Guardian’s Caroline Sullivan believes he could have been “teleported from Greenwich Village circa 1962”.) He is one of the new darlings of Radio 1 and placed fifth in the Sound of 2014 selected by music critics (Haim, CHVRCHES and Laura Mvula were among those touted for success in 2013).
His new EP is going to be called Cassy O and it is this title track that gets everyone moving. It’s up-tempo and relentless, particularly in the chorus with a kind of manual vocal reverb on the ‘O’.
A little ironically, it is filled with meditations on time moving too quickly (“Well I got my tracing paper / So that I could trace my clock / And the bastard face kept changing / And the hands, they wouldn’t stop”). Despite being a solo act with a guitar, Ezra hasn’t fallen into the trap of the melancholy folk song; instead his songs swing between a kind of ravenous delight in fury and up-tempo escapist storytelling.
As he performs he fixes the crowd with a deep, intense gaze and it never once wavers, there is something curiously but attractively unnerving about it. In between songs he chats away happily, giving shout-outs to his sister on the merchandise stand and his tour manager and marvelling that for the first time he has two guitars.
George explains that he shut himself away in the studio from mid-November to January and forgot how to communicate with humans but, on the plus side, now has an album’s worth of material, which he hopes to release this year.
The songs themselves were born under the most different of circumstances – many were written during a nomadic train trip around Europe. He wrote one of his most famous tracks, ‘Budapest’, while lamenting that he never made it to Budapest. It has a softly staccato acoustic rhythm and sounds like a breezy love song to summer travels (“for you / you / I’d leave it all”).
“I thought about changing the name of this song so as not to cause any offense”, George jokes as the mother of all storms rages outside and he tunes up for ‘Did You Hear the Rain?’.
This song epitomises his whole performance-character. “Oh did I send a shiver / Down your spine? / Well I do it all the time / It’s a little trick of mine”, he sings with a sly smile, “Lord I’m spreading like disease / Lord, I’m all up in your mind / Oh Lucifer’s inside”. The song feels like a dark seduction, with steady, earthy guitar riffs and a wolf-howl falsetto at the end of each chorus.
Ezra certainly showcases his talent, in ‘Leaving it Up to You’ he takes on a chorus that he’d originally recorded with three girls while casually engineering the murder of a love rival in ‘Drawing Board’.
It’s easy to forget how young and fresh-faced he is. If anything the set is over too quickly, but isn’t it great when you’ve been on your feet for two hours to be left wanting more?
As we all shuffle out of the door, knowing we’ve witnessed something unique, we look to the sky; it’s stopped raining.
